Apple Music app is now available on Samsung's smart TV models from 2018 and later
Another Apple service comes to Samsung's sets, available now — Apple Music is getting an app on Samsung's most recent smart TVs, the two companies announced today. It's the latest expansion …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second act of the Apple-on-Samsung détente: after Samsung rolled out the Apple TV app and AirPlay 2 to its 2018 and 2019 sets last year, following the iTunes app announcement at CES, Apple Music now fills in the audio half of the same firmware-updated installed base.
For Apple, it extends a pattern already proven off its own hardware — Apple Music reached Amazon's Fire TV and Echo devices — turning rival screens into subscription surfaces rather than walled-garden exclusives.
First-order effects
- Owners of Samsung smart TVs from 2018 onward can stream Apple Music natively without an AirPlay-paired iPhone or a separate streaming box, making the service usable on the biggest screen in the home for the first time.
- The move deepens the Apple-Samsung services relationship beyond video, giving Samsung's Tizen platform another marquee app to advertise against rivals' sets.
Second-order effects
- Samsung's Spotify partnership across phones, Bixby, and other devices now sits alongside a direct competitor on the same TVs, forcing Samsung to balance two music partners rather than champion one.
- Sony's rollout of the Apple TV app to its own 2018-and-newer sets shows the template spreading to other manufacturers, pressuring every major TV maker to host Apple's apps or risk looking incomplete next to them.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Apple's services revenue increasingly depends on third-party hardware distribution — the living room becomes a multi-brand app battleground where TV makers compete on which subscriptions they host, not just on panel quality.
- For music streaming specifically, platform access becomes table stakes: a service absent from the major smart-TV platforms cedes the shared-speaker household to those present, pushing the market toward ubiquity-over-exclusivity economics.
The trend: Apple is systematically porting its services onto rival platforms — Samsung TVs, Fire TV, Echo, Sony sets — trading hardware exclusivity for subscription reach across the living room.